Relations To Other Language Families
Elamite is regarded by the vast majority of linguists as a language isolate and has no close relation to the neighbouring Semitic languages, Indo-European languages or to Sumerian (a fellow isolate), even though it adopted the Sumerian-Akkadian cuneiform script. A minority of linguists have attempted to link Elamite with other language groups; David McAlpin proposed an Elamo-Dravidian family with the Dravidian languages of India, Vaclav Blazek proposed a relation with Semitic languages of the Near East, and George Starostin published lexicostatistics finding Elamite to be approximately equidistant from Nostratic and Semitic but more distant from Sino-Caucasian.
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